


Fitz Kreiner is a Cutie

by EmilyoftheDrums



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who: Eighth Doctor Adventures - Various Authors
Genre: High School AU, M/M, Music Nerds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 13:10:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3069341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmilyoftheDrums/pseuds/EmilyoftheDrums
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone leaves a mysterious note on the school bathroom wall, and Fitz has to work with the weird boy in Music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fitz Kreiner is a Cutie

The last thing Fitz was expecting to see on the school bathroom wall was his name. The phrase 'Fitz Kreiner is a cutie' had been scrawled in blue ink across the wall in a curly, slightly messy, script. Well. That was a first. 

Presumably it was a boy, seeing as it was in the boy's toilets where no girl dared to go, and also no girl had ever called him a cutie before. Hot, occasionally, and 'piss off and quit flirting with me', several times. But never 'cutie'. Hm. The leaver of the note would probably remain a mystery, and in a couple days some idiot would almost definitely have drawn a penis or scrawled the word 'gay' over the top of it. Such was the way of school life. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Fitz forgot about the note for most of the day, only remembering when he was boredly sat at the back of Music class half-listening to the teacher drone on about needing band members for the school show, and how they should all join because the younger kids needed responsible sixteen-year-olds to look up to. Responsible. Ha. Looking around the fourteen bored teenagers in the room, Fitz could see two girls texting each other under the desks, one boy sketching an insulting caricature of the teacher's face, and three people throwing paper at the drumkit to get the cymbals to make a noise, and so far failing pretty badly. Fitz himself was idly planning song lyrics, scribbling down ideas and words in a worn notepad and waiting for an excuse to get his guitar out. 

Eventually, the teacher finished droning and explained their task for the day. Pair up and write a song, finish it for homework and perform in the next lesson. Easy. Except-ah, shit. Fitz's go-to Music partner had found someone else. Um... There was that pretty blonde girl, Sam, but she brushed right past him and moved to sit with her friend. That left... He scanned the room, eyes settling on-oh no. The weird boy. Great. 

Sighing, he moved over to sit down next to the boy, figuring that if he was going to have to work with him for the next week, he may as well try to get along with him. 

"Hey, Paul." 

Paul looked up from closely examining his hands and half smiled.   
"Hi, Fitz. Fitz? It is Fitz, isn't it? Fitz."

Fitz nodded, wondering idly how Paul knew his name. They never spoke, and Paul seemed to keep himself to himself.   
"What do you play?" He asked, without very much hope that it would be anything normal. 

"Um... Mandolin. Harpsichord. Violin. Piano. Sitar." He reeled the list off as if a sixteen year old playing all these things was the most normal thing in the world. 

"Right. Well... Have you ever written a song before?" Fitz guessed he probably hadn't, and would just daydream while Fitz did all the work. 

"Poetry? I've written poetry." Of course he had. He was a sixteen year old boy with long curly hair who played the freaking mandolin and wrote poetry. Oh well. It was a start. He could get Paul to write lyrics while he focused on his guitar. 

"Okay, how about you start writing some ideas down, I'll figure out some chords." Paul nodded and pulled out a sketchbook and a fountain pen and began to write. Fitz spent five minutes or so tuning his guitar, and started idly strumming, losing himself in the notes until Paul tapped him on the shoulder and he jumped, managing to drop his pick into his guitar. 

"Ah, shit..." He turned the instrument upside down and shook it gently, peering into the black space inside until the pick fell out and hit him on the nose. "Ow. Anyway, Paul, sorry. What did you want?"

Paul pushed the sketchbook over to him and smiled, reaching over to brush away a speck of dust from Fitz's face that had come out with the guitar pick. Fitz blushed a little, unused to gestures like that from other boys. In his experience, most people would have followed a moment like that with a loud cry of 'no homo' and a 'friendly' punch to the shoulder. Paul, however, just carried on being Paul. 

Fitz cleared his throat to cover his slight lapse in...in... He didn't know, exactly, but it was a lapse in something, definitely. He took the sketchbook and scanned the lyrics scrawled there. They were pretty decent for a beginner. A little on the romantic side, and the Romantic side, to make a bad pun, but oh well. And one other thing...

"Paul? These are all written...um...about a boy. Was-was that intentional? Are you...Y'know..."

Paul shifted in his seat and looked down, nodding very quickly and hiding his face with his hair.   
"I-I can change them if you want me too...sorry, I just..."

"It's fine. These are great. Really. Let me just..." He added a few extra words and crossed out a small part of the chorus. "There. Now it fits a traditional song structure."

Paul smiled and thanked him, taking back the sketchbook. Someone carrying a large keyboard managed to knock it out of his hand, and it fell to the floor and landed open to a page full of more writing. Fitz could have sworn he saw his name, but Paul had snatched up the book again before he could check, and was blushing furiously. 

"You okay, mate?" Fitz nudged him gently and he flinched away, turning his back and opening the sketchbook to the song lyrics. Well. Fitz supposed this was why people called Paul weird. He went back to his guitar, and only noticed that Paul's handwriting perfectly matched that of the handwriting on the bathroom wall when he'd already left the classroom. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It was a day later in their Science class when Paul wandered shyly up to Fitz and asked if he'd like to come to his house to practise their Music assignment. Fitz ignored the chorus of 'piss off, freak' from his friends and nodded, smiling and holding out a hand so Paul could quickly scrawl his address down onto it.   
"See you later, then, mate."

"Bye." Paul dashed off back to his seat and Fitz's friends burst out laughing, doing increasingly ridiculous imitations of Paul until Fitz got tired and spoke up. 

"Cut the kid some slack, would you? He's actually pretty nice."

His friends were quiet for a minute, until someone muttered 'gay' under their breath and everyone burst out laughing again. 

"Shut up..."

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Paul lived in a pretty nice house about ten minutes from Fitz's own block of flats. He walked up and rang the doorbell, hovering awkwardly outside for maybe ten seconds before the door opened and a girl, maybe about nine or ten, poked her head out.   
"Are you Fitz?" She asked. 

Fitz nodded. 

"Paul!" The girl shouted up the staircase. "This guy says he's Fitz! Should I let him in?"

Paul emerged from a room at the top of the stairs and and smiled when he saw Fitz.   
"Yeah, Grace, you can let him in. Hey, Fitz." He seemed so much more confident and cheerful now that he wasn't in school. It was like he was a completely different person. 

"Hey, Paul. That your little sister?" He gestured at Grace, who was running into what he assumed was the living room. 

"No, her mum is a doctor and my mum agreed to look after her while her mum is busy doing doctor...stuff." Paul began to walk back up the stairs, motioning for Fitz to follow. "So, I have a final version of the lyrics, sorry if they're a tad sappy or anything."

"I'm sure they're fine." Fitz wandered after Paul up the stairs, carefully carrying his guitar, walking through the door to his room that was politely held open for him and instantly stopping. "Paul. This is SO cool." 

The coolness in question was an entire wall covered in records, save for one small bookshelf that held an old-timey gramophone and even more records. An electric keyboard was propped against one wall, next to a blue velvet violin case and a strange instrument that Fitz assumed was a mandolin. A large desk in front of the window held an assortment of notebooks and an MP3 player attached to a large speaker. Fitz couldn't help giving the mandolin an experimental strum and he walked into the room and perched on the edge of the neatly made bed. 

Paul smiled and put out a hand to silence the hum of the mandolin, sitting next to Fitz just ever so slightly closer than most boys would.   
"So. Song. I have theeeese..." He reached over the top of Fitz to snatch a notebook off his desk, staying stretched across Fitz's legs for a fraction of a second longer than necessary. Fitz felt the tips of his ears burning red. He flipped to a page in the notebook and handed it to Fitz, making a show of smoothing the paper out with one long finger. 

Was he being flirted with? Fitz wasn't entirely sure. It certainly seemed that way. Had it been a girl stretching herself over his lap, he would have said it was definitely flirting. But Paul was not a girl, despite that one cruel rumour someone had spread a couple years back. But then again, there was the whole gay thing. Fitz didn't really know how to feel about that. And there was the problem of how Paul seemed able to make him blush like a little girl, which no one could do. Ah, the joys of confused teenage sexuality crises. 

Anyway. Lyrics. They looked pretty good, similar to the ones from earlier, just tidied up and edited a bit. And Fitz couldn't help but notice the tiny heart drawn over the 'I' in 'Fitz' at the bottom of the piece, where Paul had written 'by Paul and Fitz, 11/12/14'. Fitz pointedly ignored the heart, and the fact that his ears were probably going bright red again.   
"I-um, practise. We should do some practise." He picked up his guitar, giving it a quick strum and turning his full attention to the song, absolutely determined not to be distracted by-by whatever it was about Paul that was so incredibly distracting. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

There was another message on the bathroom wall. The previous one had, as predicted, been turned into a crude penis. However, just above it, in the same curly, slightly messy script, was written 'Fitz Kreiner plays the guitar like a dream'. Well. Okay then. This was... This was definitely Paul. Definitely. 

Fitz wasn't too sure how to feel about that, but as far as he could tell, he wasn't disgusted or annoyed or any of the other things a straight boy probably should be. If he was completely honest with himself, Paul wasn't all that bad. More than that. He was great. The three hours he'd spent at Paul's house had been the three best hours he'd had for quite some time. He'd grown to rather enjoy the flirting after a little while. 

On the other hand, though, there was the fact that Fitz had not been raised in an educated household, really, and had not a single clue about whether he was supposed to like both boys and girls. Was he just a bit confused? Ugh, how were you supposed to deal with stuff like this? Who did you talk to?

The bell for the end of lunchtime rang, and Fitz was forced to stop standing like a lemon in the middle of the boy's toilets and go to class. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Fitz's next encounter with Paul came the next day, at breaktime. He was slouched against a tree with several of his friends, casually throwing grapes into the mouth of one of them, much to the amusement of everyone else. The laughing stopped when his friend Tamsin nudged him, giggling and pointing.   
"Fitz, look, it's your new little friend, the gay freak!" She giggled, and Fitz's other friends joined in. 

Fitz looked up to see Paul wandering towards him, smiling slightly and humming the tune of the song they'd written together. He silently willed the other boy to leave, he didn't want him to have to face the inevitable mockery from his friends. 

No such luck. Paul knelt down next to Fitz, smiling broadly and starting to speak.   
"Hi, Fitz. Just wondered if you wanted to come over again--"

He was cut off by a rude interruption from Tamsin.   
"Fuck OFF, Paul. Fitz doesn't like you and he never will, and he's certainly not gay. He's way out of your league anyway. Your league is more... Snails. Or those gross little spiders that get in your hair. Piss off back to your hole in the ground and stop bothering Fitz." She wrapped a protective arm around Fitz, and Fitz stiffened. 

Paul froze, looking from Tamsin to Fitz to the ground, and back to Fitz, who didn't know what to say. He didn't move for ten long seconds, and then he got up and walked off, perfectly calm until he was a good distance away. He paused, then visibly crumpled and broke into a run, pushing open a door and disappearing inside. 

Fitz unfroze at almost the exact same time, throwing off Tamsin's arm and running after Paul, only pausing to shout at his friends   
"What the FUCK was that for!" before he followed the other boy inside. 

He had a feeling he knew where Paul was, so he ran to the boy's toilets, ignoring a shout from a teacher threatening detention if he didn't slow down. He shoved open the door, heading straight for the one cubicle that was locked shut. 

"Paul? You in there?" He knocked softly on the door. "I can help if you want me to... I'm so sorry. My friends are assholes. I don't even want them as my friends anymore. I'm so, so sorry, Paul."

Silence. 

Wait-no. A muffled sob, followed by a shaky breath and a barely controlled, shaking voice saying   
"Go away. You don't have to pretend to like me. Just go away."

"Paul. I'm not pretending to like you, I promise. I actually really do like you. Just come out of there, please?"

There was another long silence, and Fitz was just about to speak again when the latch clicked and Paul came out, looking even smaller than usual. His eyes were red, and his hands were shaking. Something inside Fitz snapped and he made himself a silent promise to never speak to his so called friends again.   
"Let's get you home. Come on." He took Paul's wrist and steered him out of the toilets, stopping when the other boy protested. 

"Fitz, it's not the end of the day yet. We can't skip school." 

Fitz surveyed the still shaking boy, taking in the red, swollen eyes, the tear stained face, and the broken posture.   
"Yes. Yes we can skip school. Come on."

He didn't give Paul a chance to protest, not now, and not on the way back to his house. It wasn't until the two boys were sat on Paul's bed, Fitz thanking his lucky stars that Paul's parents were out, that Paul had a chance to speak. 

"Are-are you sure you don't hate me?" His voice was full of trembling uncertainty, and he had moved right to the other side of the bed, as far away from Fitz as he could. Almost like he was scared. 

"I'm sure. Really, Paul, why would I hate you? What have you ever done to me?"

Paul relaxed a bit, then blushed bright red and shook his head, shifting awkwardly. 

"A-Aside from the notes on the bathroom wall, I mean." Fitz wasn't sure if this was the right time to bring it up, but hey. What the hell. Why not. 

Paul flushed even redder and turned to Fitz.   
"You-you knew that was me? S-sorry-I-I-um..." He stood up and started pacing the room, twisting his hands behind his back. 

Fitz almost laughed at the reaction, he probably would have done if not for the sudden twisted knot in his stomach, that doubt from before. Did he like Paul? Did he LIKE like Paul?  
"Y'know, I...didn't mind the...the notes. I-I, um... You know what I mean..."

Paul stopped pacing and sat down next to Fitz. He was close again, like he had been a few days before. Close enough that he was surprised Fitz couldn't hear his heart beating fast.   
"I'm not sure I do understand what you mean..." He leant in a little closer, all traces of sadness gone. He could draw a confession out of Fitz. This was his chance. 

Fitz was a little bit frozen. He'd done this with girls many times, why was this different. All he had to do was smile and look Paul in the eyes and say something romantic, but no. All he wanted to do was run away and hide, like a little kid talking to his first crush.   
"I... You...um... Shit. Shit, what am I...sorry... Anyway-um...what I mean is that I-I..."

Paul smiled, looked Fitz right in the eyes, and kissed him. Just quick, and gentle, and when he pulled away Fitz looked at him in slight dazed shock and blinked.   
"Y-yeah. That-that's it. More of that please. I like you. A lot. Sorry. Can you do that again?"

Paul tried not to grin triumphantly as he moved in to kiss Fitz again, longer and deeper this time, dragging it out for a full minute. He was tempted to go further, but decided against it, reasoning that Fitz needed some time to get over the shock that he'd just kissed a boy. And liked it, if the cute hazy look in his grey eyes was anything to go by. 

Fitz was kind of in shock, and simultaneously the happiest he'd ever been. Paul had kissed him. PAUL had kissed him. HIM. Was the whole world going mad? Mad in a very, very attractive way. But still mad. Paul had KISSED him. He fell back onto the bed, registering Paul take his hand and fall down next to him, resting his head on Fitz's shoulder.   
"So. I guess we're dating now."

Fitz nodded, still a little bit in shock.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

A few days later, and the few best days of Fitz's life, he was once again in Music, strumming his guitar in front of the class with Paul singing next to him, listening carefully and almost laughing as he realised that Paul's lyrics had been written about him. Sneaky little shit. Sneaky and amazing little shit. 

Fitz made a mental note to kiss Paul even more than usual when he came round this evening, although maybe that was too enjoyable for song payback. Oh well. He would kiss him anyway.


End file.
